Mayor Mitch Landrieu: Armstrong Park contractor A.M.E. has been taken off job

New Orleans officials have ordered an error-prone contractor working in Armstrong Park to stop work after its crews mangled the park's beloved namesake statue.

Michael DeMocker, The Times-PicayuneThe statue of Louis Armstrong in Armstrong Park is reinforced by ropes Wednesday after what has been called shoddy concrete work.

"Enough is enough," said Mayor Mitch Landrieu in a speech this afternoon, as he announced that contractor A.M.E. Disaster Recovery has been ordered off the job. Landrieu said that he had directed the city attorney "to contact the bonding company and exercise the City's legal remedies to complete the work -- on task and on time."

Over the weekend, city officials discovered that A.M.E. crews had seriously damaged the park's 10-foot bronze statue of trumpeter Louis Armstrong. The statue has now been stabilized with a pinwheel of supersize bungee cords, but its formerly flat bronze base is now rounded in the center like a dome, and there's a visible fissure beneath Armstrong's left shoe that nearly separates the shoe from the base.

A.M.E.'s near-comedy of errors includes concrete pathways was were poured badly several times and had to be ripped out and repoured, then ripped out again; drivers of skid loaders who careened around the park, damaging curbing and other sculptures, knocking a light pole into the lagoon and toppling a 50-foot palm tree; and machine operators who broke manholes and sprinkler pipes and cut buried power and phone lines.

In his speech, Landrieu cited A.M.E.'s problems as "a prime example" of the "complete and utter dysfunction" that city officials have found in many recovery projects.

In the last days of April, crews from A.M.E. worked feverishly to complete work, using spotlights to extend workdays, so that Mayor Ray Nagin could unveil the Roots of Music Cultural Sculpture Garden in his final days in office.

Nagin introduced the sculptures in a ceremony on April 28, five days before he left office. The mayor himself inspected the progress a couple of days earlier, posing for pictures with construction workers. Nagin said just before he left office that he considered the Armstrong renovations one of his proudest legacies. "When we finish with Armstrong Park, you're going to be blown away," he promised.

Landrieu took note of the project's hurried schedule in today's speech. "A rushed process led to shoddy workmanship," he said.

Within days of the unveiling, the newly poured sidewalk began cracking because crews had incorrectly placed the rebar, which gives concrete additional strength, on the bottom of the slab instead of in the middle. In some places, crews have poured concrete, ripped it out and repoured it several times.

A.M.E. did not respond Thursday to phone calls about the situation.

The cement and curbing portion of the work is worth $652,434, but only $55,453 worth of work had been accepted and paid as of May 24, when the city launched a formal examination of the concrete and related work, Cedric Grant, deputy mayor of facilities, infrastructure and community development said last month.

The Armstrong contract and others held by A.M.E. were among those that prompted the City Council to pass an ordinance earlier this year barring the city from awarding any work to businesses run by people convicted of certain public-corruption felonies. The council overrode a Nagin veto on the ordinance, but it cannot be applied retroactively to existing contracts.

A.M.E. got a $2.6 million contract for what's called Phase 3 of Armstrong Park's restoration in December 2009, a year after Burnell Moliere, the founder of the company and other similarly named companies housed at the same address, pleaded guilty to helping the former head of the Orleans Parish School Board collect a bribe.

In addition to the concrete for the main Rampart Street entrance, new pathways and the Armstrong plaza, Phase 3 work includes installing the red, semicircular Voodoo Fountain in the lagoon to make room for the new plaza; repairing the Congo Square fountains built in 1980; adding new irrigation, landscaping and security lighting; and moving and placing the Armstrong statue in the park along with six other statues that are part of the new Roots of Music sculpture garden: artistic representations of the old French Opera House, Congo Square, Mahalia Jackson, jazz trumpeter Buddy Bolden, Yellow Pocahontas Big Chief Tootie Montana and jazz reedman Sidney Bechet.

The Jackson statue was sculpted by Elizabeth Catlett, 95, who also created the Armstrong statue in 1975 for the city's bicentennial celebration and who founded the Dillard University art department and served as its director from 1940 to 1942.The flawed concrete has now been removed, making the park nearly impassable from one end to the other. And until the work is re-done, the park is closed.

Earlier this week, the locked North Rampart Street gates puzzled Canadian tourists Inez Richards and her son Joseph Richards, who nonetheless jumped between puddles to snap photos of each other standing underneath the park's massive Rampart Street archway.

They'd walked from their hotel specifically to see the Armstrong statue, they said. So when the gates opened for a dumptruck, they plodded through the mud behind the truck, almost reaching the statue before construction crews shooed them away.Joseph Richards thumbed through his New Orleans guidebook and pointed at the book's warning to tourists that the park was under construction as the book went to press in 2008.